by Larry Leavitt

SAN JOSE–Saturday night’s game five was something that I predicted that it would go five games and if the Sharks swept in L.A. that would have been very surprising. They did lack in their defense a little, their defensive game suffered in game four in Los Angeles and it showed. There were a lot of easy goals and it may have been easy for the L.A. Kings to come back into the series and granted that the Sharks are a good team and their going to come back to play hard.

If the Sharks play their defense and play the way they been playing they can do it and it’s going to be a five game series and in order for it to go five they had to lose one and they did so the Sharks are trying to close it out on Saturday night in San Jose. The bottom line for the Sharks coming into game four they knew they had three games in hand and human nature says you don’t have to win that fourth game for the sweep.

In the back of their minds they want to win it and they want to play good hockey and they came out and played a good game they just lacked on the defense and the Kings got some lucky bounces. The Sharks have been getting some lucky bounces in the series and some of those goals being tipped off and being tipped to the right person. It’s amazing sometimes how the puck doesn’t bounce your way.

I was thinking about this the other day about who would be the most valuable player on the Sharks right now and you could go into the third and fourth lines and talk about value in this series. They’ve all come on strong, they’ve all played a well rounded game and that’s what it takes to win the Stanley Cup if you look over the years at the Stanley Cup winners it’s not just the first line, it’s not just the second line, and it’s not the third line, its every line that has to contribute .

It doesn’t always have to be a goal it just has to be quality minutes out on the ice which gives some of your big guys some rest. So looking at Joe Thornton, Logan Couture, and Patrick Marleau you could just start with these three guys and you could go on. Tommy Wingles hasn’t scored a lot of goals but man he’s been so powerful and as long as you go out there and put out good quality minutes that just adds to the enjoyment of the win.

The primary goal of the game is to play defense, the secondary is scoring, and the third would be the physical play. The physical play is going to play throughout and it has to in games one through four, they took down some numbers entering game four of some of the cheap shot artists and some of the Sharks players didn’t like what they saw near the end of the game. ‘

The Kings were up and the Sharks were taking a lot of cheap shots and they took some numbers and they waited for the right moment and they may go to hit somebody into the boards they may have to put some extra umph into it.

Larry Leavitt does weekly commentary on Sharks hockey for http://www.sportsradioservice.com